Film review: Jericho Ridge

British filmmaker Will Gilbey has taken his talents across the pond for survival thriller Jericho Ridge, marking his directorial debut after years in the industry as a screenwriter and editor. Set in a remote town within the mountainous landscape of Washington state, the plot follows Deputy Tabby Temple (Nikki Amuka-Bird) en route to start a graveyard shift at the local station with her teenage son Monty (Zack Morris) in tow.

Hampered by a broken ankle that has kept her off duty for a while, she’s greeted on her arrival by Sheriff Eddie Reynolds (Simon Kunz) and Chief Deputy Dennis Bailey (Chris Reilly) with a handover and expects to have an uneventful evening ahead. However, when a spate of crimes break out in the surrounding area and a suspicious maintenance worker turns up on the scene, she soon finds herself isolated and under attack.

A simple premise is established quickly as our protagonist hunkers down to defend her base, but the chamber piece is more concerned with setting its suspenseful, hostile tone. Its style is a homage of sorts to John Carpenter’s low-budget cult classic Assault on Precinct 13; every frame is coated in a steely blue sheen and a pulsing score permeates the pores of each nerve-shredding sequence, holding us in a vice-like grip.

Despite being a very American story, the director calls upon a mostly British ensemble to fill his cast of cops and criminals. A lot of the supporting players come and go in brief cameos, with Philipp Christopher in creepily menacing form as one of many unsavoury faces. Straddling the line between good and evil, Michael Socha is terrific and is integral to a riff on the ‘Chekhov’s gun’ narrative device that delivers a brilliant payoff in the third act. In the leading role, Nikki Amuka-Bird guides us through the dread and terror with her expressions alone. She’s the beating heart of the film and its moral compass, unwavering in her mission to protect civilians, her colleagues, her family, and herself.

With its scaled-back structure and taut script, not a second is spared from the tension in Will Gilbey’s Jericho Ridge, a lean and mean feature debut that feels like a slick throwback to the grainy genre flicks of the 1970s.